Note: If you see this text you use a browser which does not support usual Web-standards. Therefore the design of Media Art Net will not display correctly. Contents are nevertheless provided. For greatest possible comfort and full functionality you should use one of the recommended browsers.

Visitors to ‘The Legible City', created at the Institut für Neue Medien in Frankfurt/M., are seated on a stationary bicycle and ‘move' through streets projected onto the surface in front of them. In contrast to those of a normal city, the streets here are literally legible, lined not by buildings but by letters. On their passage through the city, cyclist-visitors can pursue various narrative threads, accumulating their own history of the city. On a small display on the handlebars is a map of the city on which the cyclists can plot their position. Between 1988 and 1991 Jeffrey Shaw created three versions of ‘The Legible City': Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe. The Manhattan variant was one of the very first interactive installations, today regarded as a key work of the genre.